Tinsel Town

Been very creative today, first with the kids at home making mini Christmas trees from bits of tumbleweed from the late Derek Jarman's Dungeness garden, painted silver and hung with mini baubles and tinsel. I know it's not even December yet but it will be in a couple of days and we have to be prepared for it. We're putting our fairy lights and tree up next week. Making the trees brought back memories of our trip to Dungeness a couple of years ago, and I just found a poem I wrote when I got back about our day trip there:

Dungeness
Bleak dreary day
Driving to Dungeness
Where a man laid to rest
And grew a garden full of life
To carry on his memory
Living in Dungeness
How bleak a landscape
How flat and murky
Nuclear power station
Through the fog
Beer and fish and chips
Cowboys in porter cabin pub
Like a technicolor Texan truck stop
In a desert landscape
Flying kite with excited children
Smoked cheese and kippers
Wild rabbit skinned
From a lumberjack with a beard
Black and yellow painted cottage
Prospect place
Next door’s children matching
Black and yellow wendy house
Looking through the windows
A dark and pokey place
A bed with sheets still on it
Where a dying man rested
Tumbleweed as souvenir
Will spruce it up at Christmas
Paint it silver to commemorate
And we will tell everyone
It came from Derek Jarman’s beautiful garden
In wonderfully dreary Dungeness

Not an especially great poem but it sums up our day there.

Been doing some writing today for another project of mine, that is running alongside The Book. It's another book about how to get your kids to eat healthy food, but it's not so much about recipes, although there are many in there, but about tricks and games you can play with your kids to make eating more fun. It's also about the psychology of food and play, and how we can encourage kids to have a more positive impression of meal time. It's called 'Sneaky Goodness'. Am off to do some more now in fact.

Soundtrack: New Order- True Faith